Thoughts on my recovery, or whatever this is.

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I am noticing something. I am less stupid now. Here’s the thing: I have for the longest time been this person who wakes up pretty smart in the morning, and I’m brilliant for a few hours, and then it is all downhill from there. By bedtime, I have a double-digit IQ. This is still the same pattern, only by bedtime, I am finding myself sharper, and I really like it! I can get a little more work done before bed, or read in bed, and some of it actually sinks in. Or I have a little burst of energy before bed and might tidy something up, or get a little house thing done that makes me feel good, like ironing. (I really like ironing. I don’t know why. I just do.)

A couple of things about drinking that really scared me these last few months were the “grey outs” where I didn’t *quite* remember going to bed, and the growing number and persistence of questions in my head: “Would I have done that/said that/remembered that if I were sober?” I couldn’t answer these questions because I never took a break from drinking. It was a rare day that I didn’t have a couple of drinks, so there wasn’t even a fully sober me to use as a basis of comparison — a control group, if you will.

Alcohol does cause cognitive impairment and brain damage over time. Part of the alcoholic’s awesome arsenal of denial skills is playing games with that idea. The whole “cognitive impairment” thing doesn’t really apply to me because:

“I am a moderate drinker, not an alcoholic.” (Moderate is the *best* lying word ever!)

“I’m only 32. I’ll start to worry when I’m forty.” (Or choose some other arbitrary and elastic number.)

That’s the other thing. Whether we like it or not, our drinking years accumulate. The idea that those effects occur over time starts to resonate. I think a lot of people my age and a bit younger (I’m 48) have an added dimension to their sobriety journey in recognizing, painfully, that their daily drinking can be counted in decades. If I am brutally honest with myself, I say that I have been a daily drinker or close to it for twenty years. Twenty. Years. All of a sudden that cognitive impairment over time thing becomes relevant, even if you don’t count yourself among the most hard-core of alcoholics.

The good news is that the fuzziness from drinking seems to reverse pretty quickly if you lay off the stuff. Count me as anecdotal evidence for this! And honestly, middle-age is accompanied by a deep recognition that your time on earth is on the waning side. Do I really want to spend another decade or two in an beer and wine induced fog? I think being less stupid is better.